Fifteen officers meet at Annapolis and found a Naval Institute

Eight years after Appomattox, the U.S. Navy had shrunk to a fraction of its wartime size, and nobody in uniform was sure what came next. On October 9, 1873, fifteen officers gathered in the Naval Academy's Department of Physics and Chemistry building in Annapolis and founded the United States Naval Institute. Rear Admiral John L. Worden, the Academy's superintendent and former commander of the ironclad Monitor, became its first president. The group set out to publish a professional journal where officers could debate the Navy's future…